Is It Just MY FCP That Works Like This???

Question

I've been using FCP since 2004, all the way from version 4.5 to the current 6.0.1. From 1994 until late 2004 I used AVID software on a Mac platform. Overall I have 27 years of editing experience. The plain truth is that FCP has just NEVER worked as advertised. I've been told over and over again how our system, with its 2.7TBs of XServe/RAID drives and Black Magic Design DeckLink Extreme card, should be able to support 'several' layers of Real Time playback before having to render. "Real Time" editing is a Fantasy. In many cases I can't even get TWO "Real Time" layers. Even when the entire timeline is "Real Time" green, you still have to render because of the various picture shifts and resolution changes as it tries to play everything back without stopping. And speaking of rendering, very often I'll render a timeline, save the days work and shut down properly only to find that my sequences have to be rendered ONCE AGAIN when I reopen the project! This is completely random and I just can't figure out why it happens at all, except for the fact that FCP is bound to unrender anything at the drop of a hat. Perhaps FCP is actually designed to unrender what shouldn't have to be unrendered. My 12 year old AVID runs circles around it in this respect. With AVID, if you render 10 tracks and then add a .tiff file with an alpha to track 11 ( a .tiff that would be a "Real Time" on its own) you have to render! With AVID, what is rendered becomes and remains Real Time video and adding a true Real Time file to the TOP layer would require no rendering at all. Is it just me, or is that really how they designed FCP? Sometimes when I re-render a timeline, the newer version will appear on the computer monitors, but the SDI output will be that of the previous version. This can really burn you when a client has you change one tiny detail and you see the change on the computer monitor but the DVD you make doesn't include the change. Again, this is a random occurrence that no one has been able to explain. Hopefully someone here can enlighten me as I'm simply tired of trashing various preferences and/or reinstalling operating systems and application software. There's about 1,000 other things that don't seem right, but these concerns top the list. In six months I either have to crawl back to AVID or forge ahead with FCP. As of right now though, I truly believe that Apple won't make the necessary software improvements by then and I'll have to go back to AVID and switch systems in mid-stream.

Answer 1

Mark,
You express a misunderstanding of Safe & Unlimited RT playback.
The purpose of Unlimited RT playback is to keep pace with real-time playback. To do this, Final Cut will intentionally lower playback quality and even drop frames if it has do, and depending on your Timeline settings. If you set Timeline RT to Dynamic, then it will pre-calulate how much RT quality-frame-rate lowering it will have to do for each frame it plays back. That's why the quality goes up and down as it plays back in Dynamic RT.
The concept is that you can maintain your 'flow' as you create, not being forced to stop for a render. Then, when your creative flow pauses, you might want to render, or not.
Since Shane's already covered the v6.0.1 bug / v6.0.2 fix, I won't touch on that one.
The way FCP is designed, it doesn't typically render renders, as Avid does. FCP renders each frame of the composite, all layers, so that render file is the whole deal, not just a partial render that sits on top of or under other clips. So, FCP is designed that way. Love it or hate it, that's what it is.
HTH.